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Autonomous Elevator Inspection in Hong Kong

It seems anywhere a human eye is needed, there is a possibility to get a UAV in that space.  You continue to see the potential roles an unmanned aerospace system (UAS) can take on.  With commercial of the shelf (COTS) parts becoming more available, a UAV can play the role of inspection in confined or difficult to reach places.

Autonomous Elevator Inspection

Hong Kong is a density populated city with a great deal of vertical travel through buildings.  There are over 63,000 elevators totaling 30 million trips a day.  They have experienced a rise in elevator mishaps from 248 in 2010 to 483 in 2015.  Obviously, elevators need to be cleaned, maintained and inspected monthly.  The ‘manned’ inspection of elevators consists of high zone floors and low zone floors that technicians do not have a way to check since they are not accessible.  There are other issues with this type of maintenance such as lack of qualified technicians, high cost and lack of standardization in the elevator maintenance industry (Kit, 2016).

The proposal for an UAS using the Parrot AR.Drone to sufficiently and effectively inspect elevator cables and pulleys for defects autonomously is to be highly considered.  Since it is almost impossible to manually pilot a UAV upward and downward in the low luminance elevator shaft, a high level of autonomy is ideal in this situation.  The 4 modules that make this happen are the Image Processing, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), Navigation and Control, and Visual Inspection modules (Kit, 2016).  Technicians can input the basic information such as the number of and diameter of cables, height of the building, and size of the elevator shaft.  The UAS system uses this as a template to locate the cables.

SLAM is effective for elevator inspection because the system can acquire the images, store the cable information, and generate a real-time map.  The algorithms for cable recognition in a low luminance environment are customized in a grayscale image by a visual camera.  The Parrot AR.Drone is low cost, robust, and easy to use system equipped with gyroscope, accelerometer, altimeter, and 2 cameras.  This UAV is well equipped for this application for its hardware and onboard software using sensors to control roll, pitch, and vertical velocity.
Autonomous UAS elevator inspection has the capability to not only perform the dull, dirty, and dangerous task but also revolutionize the way elevator maintenance is accomplished by improving maintenance quality and creating higher standards in this field.

References

Kit, H. T., & Chen, H. (2016). Autonomous elevator inspection with unmanned aerial vehicle. Paper presented at the 26-33. doi:10.1109/APWC-on-CSE.2016.016

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